Checking In With Dmitry

Dmitry Orlov continues to provide insight concerning the collapse of Empire (and the entire “West” for that matter). He has detailed the “Five Stages of Collapse” based upon the demise of the Soviet Union. His latest assessment:

Collectivism is a higher form of culture exhibited by tight-knit groups that share a common ideology or faith, possess a great deal of solidarity or ésprit de corps, and have it within their cultural DNA to put the interests of the community ahead of those of the individual, all the way to suicidal altruism if the conditions warrant. Does that describe the US? No, it doesn’t. Americans’ primary allegiance is not to each other but to little green pieces of paper with pictures of dead presidents on them. Under such conditions, sudden, spontaneous appearance of a wellspring of collectivism is unlikely; what is likely is that mutual self-help will be limited to some amount of charity and a few acts of altruism based on personal sympathy. 

The US is running against a number of physical or organic limitations that no amount of regulation, compensation or social engineering can possibly overcome. The energy returned on energy invested is dropping to levels where an industrial society can no longer be maintained, making the common living arrangement unaffordable for most. The effect of forcing together organically incompatible ethnic groups breeds alienation, hostility and violence, making basic social adequacy something of a stretch goal. These are predicaments rather than problems to solve, and what one does with predicaments is accept their consequences with equanimity and poise. 

The US can be described as a single, highly integrated, systemically corrupt scheme. To say that there is some corruption in the US would be like saying that a huge termite colony has a slight termite infestation problem. Everywhere you look, be it finance, the military-industrial complex, education, medicine, the legal system, the private prison system, agriculture and food production, you see a corrupt, predatory scheme that has been enshrined and indoctrinated as the proper way to get things done. The intelligence community fabricates fake threats for the military-industrial complex; corporate lobbyists and congressional pork barrel politics micromanage the economy; food that makes people obese and sick provides profits for both the agribusiness and the medical industry; the police and the courts stock the private prison system with slave labor. Systemic corruption at this level cannot be reformed. Again, that would be like asking an exterminator to improve conditions at a termite mound.

What’s really left of empire? Just myriad stupid people “fucking around” with their “smartphones.”